by Victoria Lucas

Those who think that the title of The Burning Court refers to a physical court in the sense of a courtyard or an ordinary courtroom haven't read the book.  In fact, there is no particular enclosed space that can be more than peripheral to it, with the exceptions of a train car, a bedroom and a crypt.

It's really a quite interesting tale just from the point of view of the controversy surrounding it.  Can a detective story have elements of the supernatural?  Can a mystery also be horror fiction?  Or, as one of the main characters opines,

"Ghosts?  No; I doubt it very much.  We've managed to struggle along for a very long time without producing any ghosts.  We've been too cursed respectable.  You can't imagine a respectable ghost; it may be a credit to the family, but it's an insult to guests."

The sort of society pictured in this odd short novel/long short story is just exactly one that is based on respectability, things that are "a credit to the family," and not insulting guests (at least not to their faces).

But what kind of book is it?  I'm not going to put it in a little box.  Or even a big one, no matter whether they're made of ticky-tacky or marble.  Malvina Reynolds may be referring to look-alike townhouses (with a hint of hasty construction) in Daly City, California, but there are boxes in the head as well, and I don't want to call them into service.  They're flimsy and inadequate.

I first heard of this book when a friend sent me a tape of the radio program based on it.  My friend is an old-time-radio buff and collects this sort of thing.  This one intrigued him, because he couldn't figure out what it is.  Knowing that I'm a mystery fan, he sent it to me.  When I sent it back I could not ease his perplexity, because I don't know in what genre it should belong, and I really don't want to confine this work to any of those little boxes in peoples' heads .

The mystery is first presented as a puzzle: a series of apparently unrelated events that must fit together somehow but don't make sense, as protagonist Edward Stevens sees it.  In fact, there is some misdirection as Stevens is introduced as a man who has had a lot to do with courtyards.  The first puzzling clues are the nervousness of the head of the editorial department in which Stevens is employed in Philadelphia, a photograph, and Stevens's wife's plea that he not "pay any attention" to their neighbor who wants to see him.

Well into the first chapter (entitled "Indictment"), I had the impression that a gothic novel had been set down in a 20th-century railroad smoking car, and had followed Stevens home.

It is not until some pages later that we are given a single hint of the nature of the "court" in the title.  I think I cannot tell you more about that without spoiling the unfolding of the story as well as the ending.  There are milestones as each puzzle piece fits into another, and the picture begins to hazily take shape, which is the main story arc.

That is the mystery part.  The horror part proceeds in jerks as horror movies do.  There is a scare, then a lull and life returns to normal for awhile, then another scare, and each heart-racing event ratchets up the levels of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, doubt of one's own perceptions, and anxiety, with suspense running through all.

Braiding the two threads of this story together are the ordinary trappings of life in upper-middle-class (or lower-upper-class) 1937 America.  Yes, the book is that old.  However, a movie was made based on it last year by a European collaborative group (France and Italy, among others, with French-speaking actors).  Now that I've read the book I'm hoping that the movie (due in September in New York City) will get here soon to my neighborhood foreign-movie theater and I can see the latest incarnation of the story after catching it in radio and printed form.

After reading the book I can say that the radio program did violence to it.  In shortening it to a half-hour format the script writers deleted and did a write-around of much of the explication, conflated some of the major characters, and cut out other characters and subplots, including a second murder!  The major cut, however, was done when they completely changed the ending.  The ending, mind you, is the part of the book to which most critics object the most.  Not only is it a denial and dismissal of the detective-novel solution of the previous chapters ("It's the easiest way out.  We're all looking for easy ways, aren't we?").  It is the most macabre and supernatural bit of the book–which is probably why the writers bypassed it with a bit of voiceover ghostliness that reminds me of nothing so much as the old "The Shadow" programs I used to listen to when I was a child.

I recommend this book to anyone who doesn't mind suspense, jolts of unease, gothic-novel horrors, and mystery-like puzzles, and who does like surprises, piquant phrasing, and entertaining writing.  (I only have one nit-picking complaint: Carr uses "antimacassar" for "doily"–antimacassars are for seat backs, not tables–and compounds the error by misusing the word more than once.  I love words, you see, and it's sort of like seeing an animal abused to observe a misuse.  I find myself wincing.)

If the movie that came out last year comes to town I'll review it in light of the radio program and the book — since everyone says that one should read the book before seeing the movie.